this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
1425 points (97.7% liked)
Science Memes
17464 readers
2220 users here now
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
- Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
- Keep it rooted (on topic).
- No spam.
- Infographics welcome, get schooled.
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Research Committee
Other Mander Communities
Science and Research
Biology and Life Sciences
- !abiogenesis@mander.xyz
- !animal-behavior@mander.xyz
- !anthropology@mander.xyz
- !arachnology@mander.xyz
- !balconygardening@slrpnk.net
- !biodiversity@mander.xyz
- !biology@mander.xyz
- !biophysics@mander.xyz
- !botany@mander.xyz
- !ecology@mander.xyz
- !entomology@mander.xyz
- !fermentation@mander.xyz
- !herpetology@mander.xyz
- !houseplants@mander.xyz
- !medicine@mander.xyz
- !microscopy@mander.xyz
- !mycology@mander.xyz
- !nudibranchs@mander.xyz
- !nutrition@mander.xyz
- !palaeoecology@mander.xyz
- !palaeontology@mander.xyz
- !photosynthesis@mander.xyz
- !plantid@mander.xyz
- !plants@mander.xyz
- !reptiles and amphibians@mander.xyz
Physical Sciences
- !astronomy@mander.xyz
- !chemistry@mander.xyz
- !earthscience@mander.xyz
- !geography@mander.xyz
- !geospatial@mander.xyz
- !nuclear@mander.xyz
- !physics@mander.xyz
- !quantum-computing@mander.xyz
- !spectroscopy@mander.xyz
Humanities and Social Sciences
Practical and Applied Sciences
- !exercise-and sports-science@mander.xyz
- !gardening@mander.xyz
- !self sufficiency@mander.xyz
- !soilscience@slrpnk.net
- !terrariums@mander.xyz
- !timelapse@mander.xyz
Memes
Miscellaneous
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You mean well (edit: well. not entirely sure anymore) but even in humans it's not that simple (not to mention non-humans who might produce both sizes or switch). People who are identified as female at birth because they have a vulva may lack ovaries (or even the entire reproductive tract). They don't have any gametes but because of their outer appearance they're usually socialised as girls and only notice when they don't start menstruating at some point. I assume it's similarly possible to be born with a scrotum (and penis) but no testicles.
powerstruggle does not mean well and is trolling up and down the whole thread.
It seems like it.
Unfortunately I mean well. Sometimes people need to hear things they don't really want to hear. I'm sick of seeing people that should know better spout off unscientific nonsense because it makes them feel good. There's too much of that on Lemmy
No you don't. You're lying through your teeth as a multitude of people explain how counting works to you. Stop it.
Sorry, I wish you could believe that science accuracy is important. It's disappointing that you don't, but them's the breaks
I wish you could stop trolling. It's disappointing that you don't.
I wish it were as easy as "I'm just trolling", but Lemmy deserves better than lazy misinformation in their memes. I'm calling it out.
It is that easy. You can't even keep your shitty inaccurate definition consistent. Just stop.
I don't think you understand what definitions are in play, sadly.
And you don't understand shit.
What would convince you that you were wrong? What foundations are your world view built on that might need some re-examining?
A consistent definition, in line with modern scientific consensus, which isn't being shared by someone who decided the best time to tell people sex is strictly binary despite the evidence already presented in this thread is on a meme about atoms.
It's not the time or the place for this discussion, even if you weren't full of shit. That you are is the icing on the cake.
Go away. I'll see you again next time you decide its your moral duty to call women men I'm sure.
Fortunately, someone else already posted a good response:
https://medium.com/@alysion42/letter-to-the-us-president-and-congress-on-the-scientific-understanding-of-sex-and-gender-992051a60318
Real biologists pointing out the scientific consensus:
and
and
I mean, fuck's sake. There's nothing to argue about here. There's just the fact that this is the scientific consensus. Why does Lemmy want so very hard to be so very wrong?
If you aren't even literate enough to parse my reply why the fuck would I read your medium blog? I'm done.
That's not my medium blog, that's someone else's link from elsewhere in this thread. Ironically, they posted it without realizing that it supports my point exactly.
If you're unwilling to listen to real biologists tell you that what the scientific consensus is, then I don't think you're actually willing to change your mind. Which is fine, you can live your life however you want. Why bother pretending otherwise, though?
You're just an angsty twat that got caught up trying to defend some extremely minor and inconsequential nuance. This has caused you to dig your heels in without even arguing correctly anymore. In a different portion you were arguing there were only 2 sizes of gametes. You were intending it to be 2 types. But now that you've said size you can't bring yourself to admit you were wrong on something so pathetically inconsequential. Just admit where you said the wrong thing and shut up about the stupid minutia you keep crying about.
Sigh. There are two types of gametes (in anisogamous species), defined by their size. There can be types of sperm or eggs, but those aren't different sexes, those are subtypes of the two gamete types/sizes.
You're so wrapped up in trying to find a gotcha that you've lost yourself to blind rage. When you're ready, the science will still be there, ready for you to discover it.
Are you then going to answer my question and tell me what size gamete a body without either ovaries, uterus, and vagina, but a vulva, is "organised" around? Or are you going to shift the goalposts further? First it was "size of gametes", now its "organised around a size" and I still don't know what that even means.
Apologies if I've missed it, I still have a backlog of messages to go through. My best guess at interpreting your question that you mean something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5%CE%B1-Reductase_2_deficiency, in which a male has internal testes and is often incorrectly assigned female at birth due to ambiguous external genitalia. Is there another specific DSD you're thinking of?
No that's not what I mean. People can be born without ovaries, uterus, vagina (but have a vulva). People can also be born without testes (but have a scrotum and penis). They do not possess these organs, they are nowhere in their bodies. That's what I was talking about in the very beginning.
Let me rephrase that: people without ovaries, uterus, vagina or testes. Nowhere in their bodies. They have a vulva or a penis plus scrotum.
Their bodies are still organized around the production of one or the other of two gamete sizes. For example, the structures around the gonads would probably be used in diagnosis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramesonephric_duct
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesonephric_duct
There's nothing about the production of gametes in there.
My point is that those are some of the secondary structures you'd examine in the case of missing gonads. Nobody is born with a body plan that just has no concept of producing gametes. That's the point of saying "organized around".
So it's not the size of gametes but some secondary structures vaguely involved in the development of structures that are involved in the production of gametes. Did I get that right?
You're trying to find a gotcha where there is none. I'm telling you that your question is incoherent.
The sex of an organism is defined as the size of the gametes it is organized around producing. That's it. The secondary structures just tell you what that's likely to be, because they're correlated with it.
You're trying to posit a "spherical cow", a theoretical construct that doesn't exist. A body won't just "not have gonads". You're talking about magically poofing someone's gonads out of existence. It's the same as asking "Oh yeah, well if I was a rectangle, what sex would I be?"
I'm explaining the more reasonable and coherent case of "Assume you can't examine the gonads of a body. How can you fairly reliably determine their sex by looking at secondary structures"? Note that it's "fairly reliably" here because it's entirely the gonads that define sex (pre-emptively, yes it's gamete size, no I'm not changing the definition, but gonads are what produce gametes, stop trying to misread plain language for gotchas). If you restrict yourself from looking at gonads then you're limiting yourself to correlates
The spherical cow does exist though, it's in the teeny tiny slivers in the OP's post.
Well, can you find any such example in any literature of such a completely sexless body? It doesn't exist, but I'm interested in why you think it does
Cool, you're only now even contemplating what I've been talking about for several posts. Ovarian agenesis, Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, anorchia.
You've illustrated my point exactly. Why are those conditions called ovarian agenesis and anorchia? Think hard about that and what that implies about the fact that, even though the gonads are missing, we can tell what they would be if present. The names literally support my point. MRKH likewise leads to missing ovaries, not testes. Why is that?
So sex is determined by what structures medical professionals expect to be there.
No.
The medical professionals examine nearby structures to reveal what sex the body has.
Yeah. So "nearby structures" determine sex, not "size of gametes". What are they nearby? Possibly nothing.
Sorry, I can't help you when you're being willfully obtuse. I'll try one last analogy, which I've been resisting since it can often confuse, but I really don't know how else to get through to you. Don't bother say "Oho! Here's where the analogy fails!". I already know that, thanks.
Consider a computer program in which its "sex" is determined by the first bit it outputs, either 1 or 0. You run it and the program doesn't output anything. Oh no! What sex is it? You examine the program and find a "output_zero_bit" function that was never called. The program has no other way of writing a bit. There is no code that will output a 1, and it is impossible for the program to do so. That program would be "sexed" as a "0" because although it didn't output a 0, it has the code to output a zero and doesn't have the code to output a 1. If, at some point, we found programs that had no code to output anything at all, and had no concept of outputting either a zero or a one, we'd called those programs sexless. Those programs would be organized around producing nothing. But nothing like that has been found, and it's extremely unlikely that we ever would.
Again, don't bother responding if you're going to say "humans aren't 1's and 0's!". Already aware, thanks. I don't think we're going to get anywhere if you're going to respond with an "Oho!", but if anyone else reading this is actually curious, that analogy may help clarify the situation.
You start that "analogy" with the binary assumption. That's where it falls apart.
Yeah, that's one way to (not) answer.
I mean, your analogies that fall apart at the premise don't really help.
Yeah, I read that. I still reserve the right to reject your analogy because I don't accept it as relevant or analogue to anything. You can't go "don't say these things that disagree with me" and expect me to shrug my shoulders and go along.
Yep, good thing none of us has done that.
Not producing any gametes doesn't confuse things. Even if you don't produce any gametes, your body is organized around producing one or the other of two sizes.
Things get more interesting in other animals, though anything anywhere near us is still either male, female, or hermaphroditic. When you get down into fungi, you get gametes that are the same size and instead of sex you have mating types, where a single species can have tens of thousands of options.
No ovaries, no uterus, no vagina, just some flabby bits between the legs (that may make tummy feel funny when touched gently) - what size is this body organised around?
Edit: also, you said gametes. Goal-posting?
You get both sizes of gametes with all kinds of bodies. It's only the testes/ovaries that are reliably correlated with gamete size, and anything further away from their production than that has about the same chance of not being the style you'd expect as an atom has of not being hydrogen or helium, just like the original meme alludes to.